Lessons from Europe’s antechamber for Balkanist criticism (and its critics)

Abstract

The author is using a series of examples from her three-year research on social perception of the European Union in Croatia in order to pose several critical questions regarding the current application of the Balkanist criticism in the region and beyond. The research was conducted with three groups of interviewees who were, in different ways, related to the EU. Various notions of Europe and the Balkans, which appeared throughout these interviews, differed from the predominant discourse of the 1990s. The article also indicates the decline of the importance of symbolic geography in the interpretation of notions associated with the EU. In the questioning of metatheoretical level, the author suggests several new paths of research in Balkanist and other, closely related fields of study: admitting the importance of economy, which has been, in the past twenty years, secondary to the examination of questions related to culture and history, and also the production and flow of knowledge. In conclusion, the author proposes examining the approaches which would also enable the inclusion of the enriching, non-repressive and useful encounters between the center and periphery.

On the Side of Predictable

“…Even so, both foreign observers and local commentators portray southeast Europe, and Serbia in particular, as unusually plagued by war, crisis and strife. These constructions have specific and serious theoretical and policy consequences, in facilitating understandings of the region that variously "balkanize", "orientalise", "exoticise" and "other" or "selfother" it (Bakić -Hayden 1995;Hayden 1996Hayden , 2014Goldsworthy 1998;Liotta 2005;Đerić 2006;Kiossev 2010;Stojanović 2010;Obad 2013, are just a few studies that have criticised this tendency).…”